The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
UConn football’s shame
UConn football is still completing the college experience, except it’s something approaching the macabre. UConn students should claim free health care for PTSD after every weekend.
In the spring of 1971 I sat alone halfway up Memorial Stadium in Storrs and awaited Bob Casciola as he bounded up the steps to meet me. I was sports editor of the Connecticut Daily Campus and was about to interview the new football coach. Casciola, who played tackle for Princeton, was funny, charismatic, selfdeprecating and full of enthusiasm for the coming season. His energy swept me off my journalistic Truth North and I wrote an article declaring a new era for University of Connecticut football.
As it turned out, Casciola coached only two years, with a soso 981 record, but good enough for a tie for a conference title his first season.
UConn won its fair share of games in the Yankee Conference. And though we could never beat Yale, I never felt cheated as a student. Football was an essential part of the complete college experience for me. The overcooked tailgate barbecues, the brass section of the marching band struggling to stay onkey — those smells and sounds teased out a place in my brain forever of fall Saturday afternoons.
Now, almost 50 years later, UConn football is still completing the college experience, except it’s something approaching the macabre. UConn students should claim free health care for PTSD after every weekend.
Despite the UConn brand besmirched and turned into a joke on national TV, however, the arrogance and public statements emanating from Storrs are bizarre and borderline vulgar.
To wit, I call as my first witness head coach Randy Edsall, whose “turnaround” of that woeful state of affairs is beginning to track the fate of the White Walkers.
His boss, David Benedict, has racked up a stunning $100 million in deficits since he was hired in 2016, including a recent $20 million decision to exit the American Athletic Conference for the Big East.
The university is also on target to lose more than $20 million on football alone during Edsall’s first three years and is slated to cost students and taxpayers millions more if UConn continues its trajectory. Football is approaching losing $1 million per game played.
So it is under these circumstances that Edsall at a recent news conference came unhinged when asked a routine question about future scheduling.
“I could give a s— about the schedule going forward ... let’s just play one game at a time. God damn ... who cares about next year and the year after that and all that bulls—?” To which he left the room. Four days later UConn was creamed 4822, the team’s 20th straight loss in Division I.
Now it’s true that no one should expect an American football coach to possess the politesse of a career diplomat. But c’mon. There is a place and time for righteous indignation, especially if you’re, say, Bill Belichick and you’ve just lost the Super Bowl. But given this historic nadir — with no bottom in sight — and the extraordinary deficits, you would think someone would counsel Edsall to control his badly misplaced sense of entitlement, because this was not the first time he’s lost it.
Had I been at the news conference I would have followed Edsall with these questions:
“Do you feel an obligation to represent the university as other than just a cashsucking hole with no future?
“What do you have to say to students on campus on financial aid?
“How do you feel about having only 10,000 fans show up at a home game?” (Memorial Stadium during the Yankee Conference days drew more than UConn does now in East Hartford.)
UConn owns another new distinction: the largest subsidy of athletics in the country — a good portion of it coming off the backs of taxpayers and students. It was fairly manageable until 2014, the year UConn won its fourth national championship in men’s basketball. That year the deficit shot up to $27 million from $19 million the year before. Under AD David Benedict’s watch, UConn has recorded deficits of $35, $38, and $41 million. In 2005, it was just under $9 million.
No sport loses as much as football, which had a deficit of $8.7 million in 2018, the year it won only one game — against Division II Rhode Island.
Even the faculty senate expressed public outrage at this level of profligacy. In 2017 it issued a scathing report condemning the athletic department’s wasteful spending and its sloppy finances, concluding, “the athletic department uses accounting practices that lack clarity and transparency.” The department’s claim that no taxpayer money is involved in its operating deficit is an example of its dodgy claims using a deliberate obfuscating set of allocations to launder taxpayer money through entities such as the bookstore. However it is stated, UConn’s operating budget of $1.5 billion (not counting UConn Health) gets roughly a 25 percent contribution from state taxpayers. How the university chooses to allocate this money for public relations purposes is irrelevant. There is only one pot of cash to run the place. All the money wasted on football affects other departments, especially academics and students who are asked to pay $3,500 a year in fees. (I paid $150 in 1971.)
This unchecked behavior is the dark legacy of an athletic department which has been spinning out of control for more than a decade, when the halo of its first basketball national companionship gave rise to outlandish and oversized egos. It was then that AD Lew Perkins dreamed up the idea of building UConn into a football power. He had help from then Gov. John Rowland, the twice imprisoned pol who claimed a new stadium in the Hartford area would boost economic development. Finally, Pratt & Whitney plopped the icing on the cake when it donated the land in East Hartford. Perkins neglected that it’s really hard to build a successful bigtime football program and that to this day only 20 schools have unsubsidized programs. Strike one. All sorts of studies have proven there is virtually no subsidiary benefits for neighborhoods surrounding stadiums — professional or college. Strike 2. Pratt & Whitney was happy to unload a piece of unused land and take that tax benefit. Strike 3.
Yet, the inertia was palpable and unstoppable. The $92 million Rentschler Field opened in 2003 and for a few years UConn football seemed like it would attain the destiny envisioned by its founders.
But as Matt Brown of SB Nation correctly observed: “UConn’s only major bowl appearance since 2000 was a fluky Fiesta Bowl appearance as a fourloss team after 2010, due to the Big East’s BCS autobid. That team lost by four touchdowns to Oklahoma and lost money making the trip.”
Perkins’s biggest argument — that without football, UConn would be marginalized as schools join power conferences to exert negotiating game power with TV — vaporized as UConn, despite its enormous investment in football, was banished to the lowly AAC.
“The football team is still playing home games 22 miles from campus,” Brown wrote. “While the Huskies have literally nowhere to go but up, they’re years away from contention. Their ceiling might be low, too.”
The faculty senate report did acknowledge that athletics bring “intangible benefits to the institution by fostering a sense of identity within the university community.”
But what is the intangible benefit of a program which is the laughingstock of college football and a coach with a perverted sense of entitlement. Note to Randy Edsall: this ain’t Alabama and you ain’t Nick Saban. Please comport yourself appropriate to your mediocrity. The team is embarrassing enough in itself.
I believe what might have been an intangible benefit is now a clear and present liability. It weighs on the brand of UConn. It weighs on the students and alumni, and it weighs on the state as it tries to crawl out of its own deep hole.
It’s time to end this madness.